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Only 24% of Australian battery owners have joined a Virtual Power Plant (VPP). That’s from the ACCC’s latest electricity market report<\/a>, and the reaction has been fairly uniform: this is a problem, and the fix is to make VPPs more appealing. Better consumer protections. Simpler products. Minimum technical standards. Probably more VPP rebates.<\/p>\n \u00a0But there’s another way to read a number like that.<\/p>\n Three-quarters of battery owners looked at what VPPs were selling and said no thanks. That’s several hundred thousand people, making the same call. When that many customers walk past your product, the usual response is to take the hint and find a different product. Not to spend years and a pile of regulations making the same product slightly less objectionable.<\/p>\n A different product already exists. It’s growing fast, it asks nothing of the customer beyond a decent inverter app, and it doesn’t appear anywhere in the report’s participation figures.<\/p>\n To be counted as a VPP participant, the ACCC told me, a customer must have signed up with a VPP operator and given that operator a degree of control over the operation of their battery.<\/p>\n A customer on a battery-focused retail tariff with a high evening feed-in tariff, exporting into the grid every evening, would not be captured as a VPP participant in the report.<\/p>\n Many large battery owners are happily exporting at least 10 kWh per day into the grid during the evening peak, covering their daily supply charge and zeroing out their bill. Some owners are exporting 20kWh+ and running a nice surplus every year (but be careful – some plans don’t let you cash out). There is no VPP operator forcing their battery to do this; they are using local control to export every day on a timer in response to evening feed-in tariffs of ~20-35c per kWh.<\/p>\n Neither of these groups is in the 24%. Nor is anyone on Flow Power’s 35c FiT1<\/a><\/sup>,with customer numbers up 196% in nine months.\u00a0Nor the bloke on Whirlpool running Node-RED against live AEMO prices. Nor the growing pile of households on GloBird’s ZEROHERO with “Super Export Credits” who didn’t tick the box allowing remote control.<\/p>\n From the grid’s point of view, all these folks are helping soak up the solar glut at noon, pushing it back out at six, flattening the evening ramp.<\/p>\n The ACCC’s number isn’t wrong. It answers the question it was built to answer: how many people have signed a control agreement. My complaint is that everyone seems to treat that as the only measure of how many batteries are helping the grid through well-timed exports.<\/p>\n Table 3.7 in the ACCC’s supplementary data<\/a> gives total electricity dispatched through coordination in 2024-25: 12,631 MWh across the four regions studied. Table 3.4 puts VPP customers growing from 25,703 to 37,753 from 30 June 2024 to 30 June 2025: giving an average of 31,728 customers over the 12 months.<\/p>\n That works out at 398 kWh per customer for the year: an average of 1.09 kWh dispatched per customer per day.<\/p>\n One kilowatt hour. Most folks on high evening FiTs I know of are moving 10 to 15 kWh per day2<\/a><\/sup>.<\/p>\nThe Alternative Nobody’s Counting<\/h2>\n
What Remote Control Delivers: 1 kWh Per Day<\/h2>\n